Peasant Economy before and during the Early Stages of the Industrial Revolution. Conclusions I

Abstract

This article presents the conclusions of the first section of the international colloquium on peasant economy before and during the early period of industrialization, held in Poznań in 1975 as part of volume ten of Studia Historiae Oeconomicae. The author, acting as general rapporteur, draws a comparative balance of the contributions on peasant economy in Europe from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries and identifies the main trends and regional divergences emerging from the case studies presented at the debates.
The analysis synthesizes papers by fourteen historians from ten European countries covering Great Britain, the Southern Netherlands, Italy, Hungary, Denmark, Yugoslavia, Germany, Poland, and the Baltic region, thus spanning a wide range of geographical, legal, and economic contexts.
The conclusions emphasize that the diversity of comparative agrarian systems - between open field and pastoral regions, between east-European serfdom and free tenure, between subsistence and market-oriented production - precludes hasty generalization and requires differentiated models by region and period. Among the notable convergences, the colloquium highlighted the decisive importance of the internal market for the onset of European industrialization; the generally weak peasant participation in the agricultural commodity market; the differentiated role of feudal rent by region; and the persistence of intermediate forms between agriculture and rural industry as a path towards proletarianization and simultaneously as a brake on full industrial development.
The author stresses that no universal model of peasant economy exists and underlines the need for continued systematic regional comparison to better understand the diverse paths of transition from feudalism to agrarian capitalism in Europe.